In the days of the East Texas frontier, it was hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad.

Deep in the pine forests, before logging crews came to clear acre after acre of virgin pine, many men lived free of legal restraints, said Bob Bowman, a Lufkin historian and newspaper columnist who studies the region.

In that climate, feuds erupted.

"It was a rowdy and rough time in East Texas in those days, partly because we were just coming out of the Republic of Texas era, and Texas was still forming as a state," Bowman said by phone Friday. "People lived far back in the woods in some places, and they weren't governed by anyone. They did pretty much as they pleased."

One of the most tragic stories of Texas history involved the Conner family in Sabine County near the Sabine River Valley. In the 1880s, a series of disagreements thrust the Conners and Lowe and Smith families into a six-year feud that would bring a brutal end to the innocent and the guilty.

It all began in the early 1880s when Kit Smith and Charles Conner disagreed over who would play fiddle at a community dance. Afterward the two began to fight often when they met around the Sabine River Valley community east of Hemphill, according to the 1967 book "Gunsmoke in the Redlands," by the late Enterprise agricultural reporter Joe F. Combs.

Then, the thick pine forests served as open range for farmers, especially the Conners, who raised pigs and let them graze at will to fatten up before slaughter. When the Conners began missing hogs, they blamed the Lowe and Smith families, who lived nearby for "dogging their hogs and cutting their tails," Combs wrote, quoting witnesses' testimony.

By 1883, the two factions had begun wearing pistols in public.

On Dec. 5, 1883, "Uncle" Willis Conner and his five sons rode into the woods to check their hogs. That day, Eli Lowe and Kit Smith left on horseback to ride across the same patch of woods, not knowing they would cross the path of their enemies.